Enter your email to restore your password

Farmers and the Government have a shared moral responsibility to make the most of the potential of British farming, in a world increasingly threatened by food shortages and climate change. That was the message from NFU President Peter Kendall in his opening speech at the NFU's Centenary Conference in London on Monday. Mr Kendall said worldwide agricultural output would need to double or treble in the next 40 years to feed a fast-growing and increasingly affluent world population. Yet the scope to bring more land into production was limited, and productivity would inevitably be hampered by water shortages and climatic extremes caused by climate change.

As a country threatened less than most by both global warming and water shortages, the UK owed it to the rest of the world to make the most of its productive capacity, he argued.

He said: 'Production in this country is going to be very valuable - not only for us, but for the world as a whole.

'And when I read Goldman Sachs saying recently 'vulnerable regions of the world face the risk of famine in the next three years', it seems to me that developing the agricultural potential of this country to its fullest, is actually a moral issue.

'We have an economic duty to the citizens of Britain to optimise our production of food and bio-energy, so as to secure their supplies and act as a check on food price volatility.

'But over and above that, as a relatively favoured country, we have a moral duty to the citizens of the world, to make our optimum contribution to global supplies of food and bio-energy, but also, as I will outline later, to the science of that sustainable future. Food security is a worldwide concern. Our part in it needs to be seen in a worldwide context.'

Mr Kendall stressed this was not an argument for subsidies or greater Government intervention in the market place. What the industry needed was for the Government to wake up to the fact that productive farming matters, and act accordingly.

The NFU President laid down five shared challenges for industry and Government:

Recognising the importance of science in meeting the production challenges of the future;Investment, so as to meet production demands at the same time as reducing farming's environmental footprint;Creating a sustainable and secure supply chainJoined up thinking to provide better regulationand a simpler, more common CAP.

Mr Kendall closed his speech by calling for the Government to take action to allow Britain's farmers and growers to fulfil their potential:

'The challenges we face are now are global and they are serious. We are up for them, but if we are to make the most of our potential - as morally, I believe we must - then we need a Government that encourages and enables, not one that hampers or frustrates. And we need that commitment in actions, not just words,' he said.

Related news

US scientists have identified a new hazard linked to global warming: a change in ocean water chemistry causing nitrite pollution that could trigger toxic algal blooms and even dead zones in coastal waters.
Nitrite is a byproduct of fertiliser decay, and is becoming increasingly common as a potential pollutant as ocean temperatures rise. Humans use sodium nitrite to preserve meat products such as bacon and sausage, but health authorities would prefer to see less of it in the human diet.
In the wider world...

European scientists have dug deep to dismiss once again the old argument that climate change might be a consequence of solar radiation rather than atmospheric chemistry.
The world is warming, they confirm, because more greenhouse gases are getting into the atmosphere, and the changes in the solar cycle are not a significant factor.
This is not the first such reassurance. Teams of researchers have in the last few years eliminated cosmic radiation as a factor in climate change and confirmed that sunspots, too,...

If the distant past is anything to go by, then climate scientists may have under-estimated the hazards of greenhouse gases, and future global warming could be a lot worse than anybody thought.
The calculation rests on two things. One is a detailed reconstruction of rising greenhouse gas concentrations and an interlude of dramatic warming 56 million years ago. The other involves an almost metaphysical concept called “climate sensitivity” − the degree of warming to be expected as carbon dioxide...

Nearly 200 nations adopted the first global pact to fight climate change on Saturday, calling on the world to collectively cut and then eliminate greenhouse gas pollution but imposing no sanctions on countries that don`t.
The "Paris agreement" aims to keep global temperatures from rising another degree Celsius (1.8 Fahrenheit) between now and 2100, a key demand of poor countries ravaged by rising sea levels and other effects of climate change.
Loud applause erupted in the conference hall after French Foreign...

New research warns that longer, hotter and more frequent heatwaves than those that killed 55,000 Russians in 2010, or 72,000 in France, Portugal, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany and the UK in 2003, will hit Europe in the next two decades.
But, over the same period, Europe could also begin to get colder as a consequence of a drop in solar activity, and a century-long chill could be on the way, according to a study of long-period climate cycles.
And if global warming accelerates, and average global ocean temperatur...

Customer comments

No comments were found for Agriculture needs support in an era of water shortages and global warming say farmers. Be the first to comment!